IADA has been founded to help disabled people train and register their own dogs as Assistance Dogs.

We are supporting those that the existing Assistance Dog system is not able to support; people who already have dogs at home, people who need owner-training for guiding or hearing dogs, people who need owner-training for medical alert or response (e.g. diabetic alert, seizure alert, cardiac), adults who need Autism dogs, and people who need Assistance Dogs to mitigate mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression, or psychosis.

We are recruiting suitable applicants to the pilot of our Assistance Dog programme, which we expect to run over the next few years, but we urgently need funding. We are applying for grants, but these are difficult to secure as the benefits that Assistance Dogs provide are not widely understood. We expect to need around £15,000 in our first year.

Money is to be spent on training aids and equipment for applicants and their dogs, such as clicker sticks, rope tugs for doors and cupboards, lead sleeves during training and after qualification, jackets at appropriate stages of training and qualification, special leads and wheelchair attachments, harnesses and anything else a partnership may need.We will also provide laminated identification as required by international Assistance Dog guidelines, training guides for different stages of the programme, and membership handbooks.

The logistics of meeting, assessing, and interviewing applicants will also be very expensive. If you feel you can contribute anything at all to help our programme get going, you will be starting to change the lives of disabled people needing to train their own dogs.